Katrin Althans studied English Literature and Language, German Literature and Language as well as Communication Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. She received her Master’s degree in 2005 and also holds a German Law degree (Erstes Staatsexamen) together with a diploma in Anglo-American Law.
In 2010, Katrin published her dissertation Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film and received her PhD from the University of Bonn, Germany. After having worked as a teaching and research fellow at the Universities of Münster and Düsseldorf, she worked as lecturer in postcolonial studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and as lecturer in Australian studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). After a second maternity leave, she worked as a teaching and research fellow at the University of Düsseldorf from October 2016 to September 2018, a position funded by the Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer and the Equal Opportunities Officer. From October 2018, Katrin has been researching her PostDoc project “Stories of Refugees and the Narrative Authority of the Law” as a visiting scholar at the Postcolonial Studies Department at the University of Duisburg Essen (UDE). Funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), she worked as research fellow (Eigene Stelle) at UDE from 2020 to 2023 to write her second book on “Narratives of Flight and Migration in Literature and Law.” From 2024 to 2025, she held the position of professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at Bremen University. Since April 2025, she is Academic Director of International Programmes at the Law Faculty at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf.
Her research focuses on postcolonial anglophone and transcultural literary and cultural studies as well as English literature and culture, and she is particularly interested in the fields of Australian and Indigenous as well as transnational and transcultural Blak/Black studies, law and literature, Gothic and Crime Fiction Studies, and literary and cultural theories such as spatial theories, theories of migration, ecocriticism, and geocriticism as well as gender, translation, film, and game studies. Although she focuses on contemporary literature, she also has a keen interest in the 19th and 18th centuries. Katrin is a board member of GASt and regularly participates in GAPS and IGA events and is an active member of several international associations (BritCult, Deutscher Anglistikverband, EASA, LCH).
Furthermore, she also has experience as a freelance teacher and translator, mainly in law and the energy sector.
